


oh, there's a river (that winds on forever)

by wordybee



Series: Panta Rhei [2]
Category: Community (TV)
Genre: Alternating Jeff & Annie POV, Established Relationship, F/M, how is there still so much pining?, kinda (see: aforementioned idiots & pining), two idiots in love
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-21
Updated: 2018-12-01
Packaged: 2019-06-30 16:49:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15755814
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wordybee/pseuds/wordybee
Summary: Jeff has made the decision to follow Annie to D.C.Now what?





	1. Fragile Beginnings (Jeff)

**Author's Note:**

> A while ago I asked myself, "You know, that fic ended really well -- but is there a way to possibly run the risk of ruining it by tacking on another story?" and thus, a "Testing the Waters" sequel.
> 
> Special thanks to bethanyactually for beta-reading, though -- no matter how this turns out, she definitely made it better.

The dust from Jeff’s arrival settles over the awkward reality of having arrived. He’s no longer part of some big gesture, whether that big gesture is flying from Colorado to D.C. or kissing Annie in plain view of everyone who also happens to live at her crappy apartment complex. Now, in a world where they aren’t just heartbeats and hands and lips and longing, it all feels fragile, like if they so much as look at each other wrong everything could come tumbling down. Even Annie seems to be searching around for something that might stabilize the situation, something to distract them both, but there’s nothing in the place except flimsy flat-pack furniture and a large green couch along the back wall.

Personally, Jeff would be perfectly okay if the ‘distraction’ was a few more minutes of making out. Everything was fine when they were kissing. This is the aftermath, where things are precariously balanced on a razor’s edge, but the kissing — the kissing was still the big gesture. It was, despite all reasonable assumptions to the contrary, so much safer.

Things don’t seem to be going in that direction, though, because Annie fixes herself into the role of a welcoming hostess rather than stepping back up to him and returning to that safe place where they’re together, where their lips meet and he can pull her closer — that safe place in which Jeff knows, from second to second, what he should be doing, because nothing makes more sense to him than kissing Annie Edison. Instead, she’s telling him where the bathroom is (through the short hall and on the right), asking if Jeff wants anything to drink (he’s fine), if he’d like to watch TV (“There’s no cable or anything, but my internet got hooked up yesterday, so I can let you sign in to your Netflix account.”) and inquiring about his trip (it was awful). It’s all small-talk things that  _ seem _ right for welcoming a friend over to a new place, but don’t exactly fit with their particular situation.

There isn’t any small-talk protocol for suddenly arriving to kiss a friend sixteen hundred miles from the city you both lived in together, after six years of possibly mutual pining and a romantic farewell to put all those complicated feelings to bed. Ignoring the rom-com plot, there probably isn’t even any small-talk protocol for just appearing at someone’s new apartment, unannounced, while carrying a mostly empty travel bag and the weight of very little sleep. Apart from all the awkwardness, Jeff feels dead on his feet. If he can’t go back to kissing Annie, he just wants to have a seat on that ridiculously large green couch so he can rest for a bit. He tells Annie this, in lieu of answering her question about whether he’d rather watch something like  _ Daredevil _ or a more lighthearted, background-noise type show.

“Oh!” She leaves the television on the Netflix menu and rushes over to the couch, gently scooping up the smallish cardboard box that had been sitting on it, and fluffing the sad, green cushions a little. That action launches a cloud of dust motes into the air, where they delicately glitter in the minimal light allowed by the room’s single small window. Jeff’s exhausted brain thinks it’s kinda pretty.

Annie coughs and looks at Jeff with an embarrassed almost-shrug. “Sorry. All the furniture came with the place and I haven’t really had time to clean.”

When he arrives at the couch and Annie’s still standing there, just a few inches from him, there’s a brief moment where Jeff can feel the balance of their situation starting to wobble again, like a spinning plate on a pole, or an unbalanced celestial body hurtling toward the sun.

“It’s fine,” he tells her. His voice is low and quiet, and even he doesn’t know if it’s because of exhaustion or because of something else. Fear. Lust. Euphoria. Love. All of the above. Jeff used to live a very simple life of mental reset buttons and never having to deal with things that made him feel anything other than smug and proud and happy. Things were stable — comfortable, if not very good: the bland suburban-house kind of living — and now, every time he’s close to her, he can feel the world tipping beneath him, threatening to push him into a great unknown. The elation of  _ doing _ had propelled him into another world and abandoned him here, without a map or a compass or any idea of how to survive in unfamiliar lands. And however beautiful and enticing these unfamiliar lands are, Jeff still gets the sense that they are dangerous.

In this new and dangerous world, which is disguised as a seriously depressing apartment in Washington, D.C., Jeff clears his throat. His voice is still rough when he offhandedly jokes to Annie, “I probably already have some form of the plague from going through the Denver airport on no sleep and slightly hungover, so I think it’s a wash.”

He just wants to go back to that feeling from before. That feeling of doing something right, of taking a risk that paid off, of living out some grand victory — not in the sense that he’d won Annie or anything, but in the sense that he’d defeated himself, defeated that voice in the back of his head telling him he was going to die alone in a metaphorical desert of his own making. His victory over that, in particular, is still there (thank god, since he’s not sure having an existential crisis in front of Annie would do much to endear himself to her) but everything else fills him with a sense of nonspecific anxiety.

Jeff lets out a thankful groan when he finally sits down, and for the second time that morning Jeff feels all of his forty years — in a far less life-affirming way. In the way that makes him genuinely regret not doing stuff like taking last-minute flights out of Colorado to spontaneously kiss a woman in broad daylight back when he was in his twenties, because he’s sure that twenty-something Jeff Winger would not have insisted on having a rest before taking the world by storm with his girl on his arm. If he were that Jeff Winger, he would have dipped Annie back in an elegant, movie-style kiss, swept her out of her dingy flat-pack apartment, and treated her to a gourmet meal, dancing, and making love on the beach or something equally ridiculous and youthful. At forty, though, Jeff makes out with a woman for five minutes and then wants a nap. How embarrassing.

Then again, twenty-something Jeff Winger had never been in love, so he has that going for him. Young Jeff can suck it.

“I’m going to get you some water,” Annie says, and Jeff realizes he’s closed his eyes and mentally abandoned her in her own living room after completely disrupting her life out here in D.C. He feels bad about that — really bad, because he does want to try to be less selfish and he thinks he’s been making progress on that front — but mostly, he’s tired. Too tired to lift his eyelids and watch her walk into the adjacent kitchen. He can hear her, though. The apartment’s so tiny he can hear every step, hear her dig through cabinets for a glass, hear her soft ‘a-ha!’ when she finds one, and then the sound of the faucet running, her retracing her steps back to him, and setting the glass on the little table next to the couch.

“Sorry,” Jeff mutters, his eyes still closed and his words slurred by exhaustion. “I kinda showed up and collapsed on you here.”

Annie makes a forgiving humming sound, then, “Did you say you’re hungover?”

“ _Slightly _ hungover, maybe. Mostly tired. With the addition of a headache — which, that water will probably help, so thank you.” He doesn’t reach for the water, though. His arms feel too heavy to move; the glass right near his elbow seems too far away.

“Sure,” says Annie. “You can put your feet up if you want, Jeff. Rest a little. I have some unpacking to do, but I’ll wake you up and we can go to a late lunch, okay?”

At that, Jeff opens his eyes. Annie is standing there in front of him, but she’s not looking at him — instead, she’s looking down at her phone. The screen casts a blue-light glow against her face, which has the usual features of Annie Edison In Thought: a slightly scrunched brow, the occasional squint, idly chewing on her bottom lip. Backed by the older model TV still paused on the Netflix menu, the plain gray walls of the apartment, and the cheap furniture, she’s a familiar sight in an unfamiliar setting. The reaction Jeff has to the image of her is strong, but indecipherable for someone with his admittedly shallow (but ever-deepening) grasp of emotional nuance. He thinks he recognizes some nostalgia inside the slurry of feelings that run through him, because he can remember Annie’s similar expression during late-night grading sessions and, before that, daily study sessions. He knows he recognizes a lot of fondness, because he’s come to connect that sense of affection to Annie at all times, largely without regard to context. Then there’s a strange undercurrent of illogical jealousy that makes Jeff feel like a true narcissist, and more than a little bit of fear that he can’t pinpoint the root of.

But Jeff is far too tired to mentally dissect his own feelings in full. He takes this opportunity to grab the glass of water and nearly drain it, then flips himself around so that his feet — boots on, since this couch isn’t exactly in pristine condition and Annie’s already said she’ll be cleaning it later — are at one end of the couch and his head is against the puffy-cushioned armrest at the other. He closes his eyes again, well aware of the inevitability of sleep but also aware that Annie won’t let him sleep so long that his jet lag would get worse, and briefly notes that it’s been a long time since he’s lain on a couch without his feet dangling off the other end.

He falls asleep immediately after that thought. He dreams that he’s spinning plates, ones that always seem to be in a constant wobble without actually crashing down. In the dream, he desperately wonders when he’ll be allowed to stop —  _ if _ he’ll be allowed to stop, or if he’s just meant to spend the rest of his life on the brink of guaranteed disaster. In the dream, Jeff thinks,  _ This was supposed to be the easy part _ , but in the back of his mind he recognizes that idea as ridiculous. Whatever made him believe that  _ this _ would be easy?


	2. Fragile Beginnings (Annie)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Annie knows what perfect is.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you to the incomparable bethanyactually for beta-reading.

It has always been Annie’s experience that certain things are easy in the moment, but rarely remain so easy once that moment is gone. Letting her righteous rage start a riot in the Greendale cafeteria was easy, but spending a day cleaning up the resulting mess had been hard. Agreeing to move away because Vaughn had just read her a poem about the color of her eyes and she felt like she was at the ending of a romantic movie was easy. Telling him, in a panicked frenzy, to stop the car because she didn’t want to see him anymore, then waiting for her cab in silence as they sat in the breakdown lane of the highway heading to Delaware was hard. Kissing that guy friend she'd had a minor crush on all year and realizing that he was totally, enthusiastically kissing her back was easy. Spending a summer steadily falling into high-school levels of insecurity as he avoided her at every turn was hard.

Yes, Annie is well aware of the enticing dangers of living in the moment — of that blissful, adrenaline-fueled rightness that comes with the rush of just _doing_ instead of thinking about doing. But she is also aware of the fact that those moments only last so long, and there is a whole lot of rarely-blissful life to deal with _after_ , and that the post-moment time is often spent dealing with the chaos caused by blissful moment-living. Maybe one could call it a double-edged sword, but Annie was really starting to think it was always a single-edged sword in disguise. That those actions, no matter how right they feel during the temporary insanity that accompanies them, are always wrong, and always lead to grave repercussions.

Sometimes the universe lies to you, tells you that it’s pleased, and lures you off a ledge.

When she’s done kissing Jeff Winger in her crappy apartment’s miniscule living room, when the blissful high of living in that particular moment has faded, she becomes aware that this is the post-moment time period. This is when things will start going very bad, very quickly if she isn’t careful. She can already feel it happening a little in the way awkwardness falls over the two of them, the way they’re standing too close but not close enough for it to be romantic or sexy — well, standing around Jeff is almost always sexy, Annie thinks, but still. There’s something off-kilter about the silence of her place, about the way reality has slunk into their rom-com ending and brought with it the unpleasant air of consequence.

To fight against it, she starts talking. She chatters on about the apartment, asks inane questions about his trip, and it feels like her mouth is running at a mile a minute but she’s saying nothing at all. He’s quiet, subdued — contemplative, maybe? — and for a second, Annie feels the world-crashing panic that comes with the idea that he could be _regretting_ this. It brings back the memory of five years ago — the night of the Transfer Dance, when they had shared that mind-blowing kiss surrounded by fairy lights and the distant sound of the band inside the cafeteria starting back up. When they broke apart. When Jeff had awkwardly stepped away from her, eyes wide and breathing fast as he placed his hand against his mouth, expression akin to wonder, before blurting something about _discretion_ that she’d been too giddy to really hear. The aftermath of that, weeks later, when she realized it had all been a mistake...

But no, he just says that he’s tired. Which makes sense. Annie shows him to the couch, apologizes for the dust, and tells him to make himself at home. When he steps close to her again, she can feel that moment from before sparking back to life. He’s radiating heat. He has a half-lidded look that’s probably due to weariness, but it brings to mind other things — the way he looked after their Transfer Dance kiss five years ago, before he surged forward and made it something more than an innocent peck (before he drew back, and made it nothing at all).

The way he looked ten minutes ago, when his hands were on her body, when his fingers tangled in her hair, when his lips were against hers, then against the pulse point on her neck, and promised other places. Even though he’s been through a hell of a journey, he still smells like expensive cologne, or aftershave, or maybe the stupid froofy hair product he wears. He smells good, either way, and the memory of their kiss is close enough that repeating the action is all she can think about. _Kiss him, kiss him, kiss him_ , runs through her mind to the rhythm of her pulse — she can feel it in every fraction of a second they stand together, can feel it tingling through fingertips that urge her to reach up and undo the buttons on his shirt, can feel—

He mentions the word _hungover_ , and Annie’s thoughts grind to a halt. She takes a half-step back so that he can finally sit down on the couch, then makes another clumsy attempt at playing hostess in an apartment she just moved into. She finds the glass for Jeff in a drawer rather than a cabinet — weird, but living in Greendale has made it easy to accept weirdness in all environments — and washes it out before filling it with some water from the Brita-filtered tap. By the time she gets back to Jeff, his eyes are closed and if he weren’t still talking, she’d think he’d already fallen asleep.

“Did you say you’re hungover?” she asks, before she can stop herself. This would be a… pretty spectacular drunken event, even for Jeff, but the man was spectacular at panic. Panic plus drinking could conceivably lead him to here, to her, the same way that panic had led him to propose to Britta when the school was nearly shut down.

Jeff tells her that he’s actually only “ _slightly_ hungover,” and appends a _maybe_ onto that, so she can’t be sure. He hadn’t seemed drunk when they were kissing and the trip from the airport, plus the climb to her apartment, probably would have sobered him up plenty before he ever arrived on her doorstep. However, the lack of alcohol doesn’t rule out the panic factor of the situation.

Annie leaving. Abed leaving. Troy and Shirley and Pierce already gone. Annie had always suspected Jeff of hiding great swathes of loneliness under his aloof façade, so making friends and then losing them…

She shakes her head against that thread of worry. It isn’t anything that affects the here and now for her. Jeff is here. Now. She won’t kick him out of her apartment, but she does make special note to keep reminding herself to be careful. This is the post-moment time, where danger lurks and things could start going bad. Awareness will help, though. When you’re careening out of control, lean into the skid, right? Try and steer things back on course, but don't force it because that's how a person ends up toppling over and rolling their car right off a cliff.

She tells Jeff to rest a bit, takes out her phone and starts googling restaurants in the area while she tries to tamp down that giddy part of her that thinks _I’m going on a lunch date with Jeff!_ like she’s a teenager with a crush again. This isn’t that. She isn’t sure what this is, exactly, but she knows this can’t be that — she can’t _let_ it be that. That way, madness lies. And if he _is_ just panicking…

_Okay, Annie,_ she says to herself, _be generous with the benefit of the doubt. What if he is here for real — what then?_

Annie pauses in the middle of her google search for tapas restaurants to think on that. If Jeff is genuinely here for her, if this isn't another Britta Engagement incident, then she has to handle this even more carefully than a panic-induced bad decision on Jeff’s part. The aftermath of a real declaration — or whatever it is when a man you've had a crush on for six years and maybe loved for at least one suddenly arrives at your doorstep and kisses you senseless in front of all your new neighbors — means a much different post-moment fallout than the aftermath of another “ _This was nice but no one can know this happened and we should use discretion going forward, Annie”_ situation.

(Alright, she _does_ remember what he'd said to her after their Transfer Dance kiss. But only because it's hard to forget something you thought, at the time, was going to be a confession of love and turned out to be the sort of thing that breaks a heart slowly. Like a mild but lethal poison, or that story about the frog that boils to death without knowing. Far easier to tell herself she hadn’t been listening, and hope the words would eventually fade.)

Upon opening the door of this being a real thing, Annie is overwhelmed with the knowledge that she wants to _keep_ it. She wants this to work. She wants Jeff to want her, to want to be with her, to want to stay with her when the dust settles and there’s no more thrilling spontaneity to what they have together. Nervousness settles in. Anxiety. _Panic_. Annie can panic just as thoroughly as Jeff Winger can panic, after all — she’s just never proposed to any of her friends as a result.

Experience isn’t the problem. Annie isn’t ashamed of her level of experience with sex. She certainly is not ashamed of her level of experience with dating, especially compared to Jeff Winger, who has only dated one person in all the time Annie has known him (two, if she counts Britta, but she doesn’t think she can) while Annie herself has claim to at least a handful of romantic failures. What frightens her more, though, is that she is frightened. It’s the panic itself that is the problem, because the characteristic of perfectionism brings with it the innate understanding of what “perfect” is, and Jeff’s variety of “perfect” girlfriend does not include the sort of woman who stares at the blank screen of her phone, heart hammering in her chest, and thinks about her life in car crash metaphors.

Annie Edison knows perfection. She knows the perfect color and consistency paint for a congratulatory banner. She knows the perfect word choice for an essay on the history of fingerprinting as a forensic science. She knows how to attain the perfect balance of papier-mâché in diorama figures, so that they neither dry out and crack apart nor refuse to dry and turn to papery goop in a shadow box. And she knows that Jeff Winger’s ideal woman is attractive, snarky, and aloof.

Although there will always be a part of her who identifies as chubby, bespectacled, pimply Annie Adderall, Annie does have enough self-awareness to understand that she is attractive. She also has enough self-awareness to understand that she’ll never have the snarking ability of someone like Britta or — and she remembers the woman’s personality only vaguely, with those memories tinged by jealousy and an embarrassing focus on the way she dressed, more than the way she behaved — Professor Slater. But it’s the aloofness that’s causing her trouble, since she believes that aloofness to be a more key ingredient than either of the other two, and it is the ingredient she is least likely to be able to believably fake.

But she can try. She has to try, because she doesn’t think she can take another rejection from Jeff. This time, if they don’t make it — she doesn’t think their friendship can just bounce back, like it had in the past. Things are too heavy now. It’s a two-ton weight of feelings balancing on a tightrope over a windy ravine, and if she makes the wrong move and sends him running for the hills, the aftermath will be devastating.

Annie takes a deep breath. She glances back to the man sleeping on her dusty, rented couch and the sight of him makes her smile. In that glance, her worries melt away and all she can think about is making sure he’s happy, making sure he’s with her for as long as possible. She lets her breath out in a quiet sigh, turns her phone back on, and renews her search for the perfect restaurant.


	3. Forward (Jeff)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> New city, new relationship, new Jeff. Everything will be fine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Special thanks, as ever, to bethanyactually for editing/beta-reading. And to the person who bugged me on tumblr and inadvertently reminded me this chapter's been written and edited forever so I probably should post it.

A crash in the kitchen wakes Jeff, sending him from sleeping to sitting up in a single terrifying second. Annie appears to his right, the yellowed overhead light haloing her in a feeble backlight. Disorientation and lighting makes it so he doesn’t quite recognize her as anything other than a person-shaped shadow, until he forces himself to focus on her worried expression and the past several hours come rushing back to him. The conversation in the bar with Britta. Booking the flight. Sitting on the plane. Feeling more anxious than he’d ever felt in his life as he waited for Annie to open her apartment door. As the events all file through his mind, he stops attributing his rapid heartbeat with the fright of his abrupt awakening and starts attributing it to more ambiguous things, mostly related to how insane this journey has been and all the ways he thinks he could screw everything up, if given half the chance.

Annie is still looking concerned nearby, a dish towel twisted between her hands. “Oops. Sorry, I dropped a glass in the sink while I was doing some dishes,” she says, coming closer to where Jeff sits on the couch’s right-of-center cushion. She sets the towel on the arm of the sofa, but doesn’t sit down. “I wanted to give you at least another fifteen minutes of sleep, but are you feeling better?”

Jeff breathes in, willing his heartbeat down to a BPM level out of heart attack range. He takes stock of his body and is surprised to find that he feels great. Far better than he should feel after sleeping on a couch for a couple hours, anyway. His body has lost the ache that had been weighing on him since he’d stepped off the plane, which he’d only been able to ignore before because of adrenaline and dramatic, romantic gestures — both of which have probably worn off by now. Honestly, he’s slept on expensive memory foam mattresses with worse results, which definitely isn’t normal. He casts a brief, suspicious glance down at the couch before looking back at Annie, and although the lighting still makes it impossible for him to see any details, he notices that she’s already dressed in a blouse and skirt combo. Jeff makes a mental bet with himself that a floral print exists on the outfit somewhere, and smiles at the thought.

“Other than the shock, I’m good,” he tells her. He draws in another deep breath through his nose and winces. “I could use a quick shower and change of clothes, though. Between the crowds at the airport and this couch, I think I’m starting to smell like a public library.”

He doesn’t need good lighting to notice when Annie fixes him with one of her judgiest expressions — the kind usually reserved for Britta’s severe behavioral lapses, or Greendale professors who fail to live up to her exacting standards. Jeff was one of those failing professors, once upon a time, so he knows the look and its ability to induce instantaneous shame very well. Actually, he was familiar with variations of Annie’s look even before he became a professor, but it certainly increased in potency after he became partly responsible for shaping the impressionable minds of Greendale students.

“Yeah, about your change of clothes,” she starts, and reaches over to pick up Jeff’s travel bag from beside the couch. “Jeff, there’s two t-shirts and seven rolled-up pairs of socks in here. You own more clothes than I do, and this is all you managed to pack?”

He doesn’t bother to act offended about Annie looking in the bag. During one of the rare occasions where Jeff invited the group over to his apartment for a party, he’d discovered that Annie had drunkenly organized all the clothes hanging in his closet by color and style, and it pretty much confirmed that Annie’s concern for properly doing things sometimes overrules her awareness of personal boundaries. Being more endeared than frustrated by that characteristic is probably a testament to how head-over-heels Jeff really was. Still is. Good lord, Jeff does wonder what his newfound acceptance of his feelings for Annie will mean for her ability to push him along in life. Oddly, he’s looking forward to finding out.

“I did say something about being in a hurry to leave,” Jeff says through a yawn.

“Yes. And there’s the hangover.”

That would be the second time since he’d made offhand mention of his drinking before the flight that Annie has brought up being hungover. He can sense there’s something there, but he can’t pinpoint what it is. What flavor of worried should he be about her mentioning that subject more than once? Impending-intervention worried? Clear-up-some-misunderstandings worried? A Serious Conversation worried? Or, maybe it’s nothing. Maybe it’s just more of Annie’s disappointment shining through. Jeff Winger: bad at planning, can’t pack while hungover, owns too many socks.

He’s willing to bet that Annie Edison could pack while hungover and owns just the right number of socks, which also probably never widow themselves in dryers or deteriorate out of sync with their matches. To say nothing of the planning, which Jeff is fairly certain she’s never been bad at, under any circumstance. If Annie had traveled halfway across a country in order to kiss the person she loved, she probably would have had a printed itinerary and scheduled everything to the minute. No semi-public, mid-morning makeout sessions under Annie’s watch; it’d all be done precisely when the moon was at its most romantic position in the sky, and somehow actual fireworks would go off as their lips touched, and Annie would be well-rested and carrying a bag containing serviceable clothes, rather than two t-shirts and seven rolled-up pairs of socks.

All of this goes to show that life has a funny way of going about things, since there’s no way Annie would have ever needed to fly halfway across the country to kiss anyone. She would have kissed them right there at home — she did; she’d kissed Jeff, and it had been incredibly romantic, even though she’d said it was a kiss goodbye. But he knows, deep down, that if he’d had even a fraction of his shit together earlier than right before she was ready to leave, if he’d told her the truth a month ago or six months ago or ten seconds after he figured it out for himself, she… would never have left.

Ah, there’s the rub.

Again, Jeff is reminded that his power lies in selfish stasis. It lies in his ability to pull people into his orbit and keep them there, unchanged, for his own benefit, to suit his own need to remain untouched by time and outside influence. Stay healthy, feel young, look young, stay in Colorado — above all else, love nothing that changes and change nothing you love. It’s how he lived for most of his life, how he carved out a comfortable space during his time as a lawyer, and even during his time as a student at Greendale. After all, even though he fell in love with a ragtag group of sitcom-worthy misfits gearing up to move on to bigger and better things, they were all stuck in the same college-shaped toilet with him for at least four years. And when all was said and done, Jeff had told himself, how far could a Greendale Community College education get a person, really?

Washington, D.C. Los Angeles. Wherever the hell Troy is.

The way the people he’d grown to love had grown away from him had been unexpected, to say the least. Jeff had ended up breaking the rules he’d set for himself without even realizing it, and there’s a sad, dark part of him still that would have given anything to keep that from happening, regardless of how negatively affected the people he loves would have been. He just has to continue being conscious of that, and make sure that sad, dark part of him never gets the reins. He’s already made a considerable journey, has already taken the biggest step in his life, so he has the tentative thought that this stay in D.C. could be a trial run for a newer, better Jeff Winger — one whose first instinct is to lift up, rather than drag down.

“We’ll go shopping after lunch,” Annie tells him, her playfully casual tone a perfect match for the odd, overwhelming sense of optimism Jeff finds himself embracing. “But you really should go take a shower and change into one of these  _ two _ shirts.”

She drops his bag on his lap, then cuts off whatever sarcastic reply might have bubbled up by kissing him. She just  _ kisses _ him, with no fanfare or prelude, and it finally hits Jeff that  _ this is what they can be now _ . A couple kissing in a living room after making plans for lunch and shopping. Once upon a time, the domesticity of that would have sent him running for the opposite coast, but he discovers that the fear of commitment he’d once suffered is no longer there, or so buried by everything he’s done and been through that it’s been reduced to something imperceptible. Apparently, once a person goes through the effort of hopping on a last-minute flight to chase after the woman he loves, decades of anxiety-driven mental programming don’t stand a chance. He hopes.

The kiss is brief, frustratingly innocent and sweet all at once — more like the kiss of an established couple, rather than two people embarking on something new and unknown — and then she pulls away. Their eyes meet. They smile at each other, and it is the strangest thing, how familiar this all feels in spite of its newness. The kissing is certainly different, but the connection is the same. The smiles are the same. The feeling Jeff gets in his chest when Annie ducks her head down, breathes out a small laugh, and rests her hand on his shoulder is still the same.

“Sorry,” she says, but she doesn’t actually sound all that sorry. He can detect a hint of smugness in her, which he enjoys enough that he’s tempted to postpone lunch and shopping just to get more of it, somehow. “It’s just, being able to kiss you without standing on my tiptoes is kind of a rare opportunity.”

He says nothing, more than a little thrown by Annie’s boldness. It’s another new thing, stumbling rather than striding through this romantic back-and-forth with someone. He’s used to always having some quip or smooth remark to toss back at the women he’s interested in, has always been able to meet every word with words sharper and smarter than the ones served up to him. But then again, it’s always been a little different with Annie. Excluding the kiss that morning, Jeff realizes, Annie has always been the initiator in their relationship. She’s always been the one throwing him for a loop, making the sort of unpredictable first moves that would leave him speechless and wondering what the hell he was meant to do next, or shamefully scrambling to erase the moment from existence out of panic.

They linger together for a moment, close but not quite close enough for Jeff’s liking, until Annie’s senses seem to return to her and she gently directs Jeff and his poorly packed bag toward the apartment’s bathroom, telling him that they can leave as soon as he’s ready. Jeff, in something of a daze, manages to lift himself from the couch and walk through the hall. Once the bathroom door is closed behind him and he’s left alone to clean up as well as he possibly can, Jeff spares a second to surface from the fog of positivity and post-kiss giddiness to note that the bathroom is almost unusably tiny for him.

Then he dives right back down into that positivity, because he figures he should enjoy it while it lasts, and he definitely shouldn’t let something as inconsequential as a —  _ seriously, was this entire room made for elves?  _ — small bathroom ruin it. He’s in D.C. with Annie, and she can kiss him on a whim, and they’re together, and it doesn’t matter that he can’t pack a travel bag while hungover, or that he owns too many socks, or that Annie makes him more tongue-tied than anyone he’s ever been with.

It doesn’t matter. Here, they don’t have to worry about any of it.


End file.
